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Comment by codazoda | Hacker News Reader

I started my blog 15 years ago. The tactic I take is to write things I think I might need again. I often write very simple blog posts, at first, and then refine those over time. For things that I only do once in a while they're valuable to refer back to. I also get a lot of nice comments from strangers saying things like, "thanks for posting that". It's definitely worth it. I write for myself, first.

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" I write for myself, first."

Exactly. I do this on my unknown blog and I love it. If someone else reads it, sure np. For me, it is more of a personal journal/diary of things that I want to write about or remember.

Oh, I do this constantly. One of my blog posts is basically a the distillation of a fairly convoluted installation processes that I stumbled upon, and I go back to it constantly to copy/paste commands out of when things stop working.

I have largely ceased blogging on a personal site, because for things that I might need again, there are other places to post it where it would be more more visible and more useful to other people, and I would be able to find it again too. Information regarding travel and local sites, for example, can go on Wikivoyage or OpenStreetMap. Observations in my own professional field can often be formally published in journals. Useful code snippets can be uploaded to package repositories like Emacs Melpa, etc. While there is a concern with contributing to walled gardens, book reviews might go to Goodreads and some travel information to iOverlander.

That's exactly how I started as well: documenting a project I was doing so the information I gathered was in one place. Just yesterday, I was writing a Makefile, and I referenced my own blog post on the topic to refresh my memory.

It really helps to have your own personal knowledge store, and writing in a way that can be published publicly helps me write clearly. Future me benefits and so do readers who I never expected would stumble onto on my writing.

This. I stopped trying to play the game of getting eyeballs because it would of meant writing crappy listicles instead of the things I actually wanted to write. Instead I focus on building a repository of interesting ideas, projects and the occasional recipe. In this way the blog becomes more of a journal.

Yes, the comments, even if rare, make my day!

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